A TRADITION of rounding up small hill ponies from local mountains for use as part of the rodeo at Llanthony Show has been slammed by a local horse charity.

The Society for the Welfare of Horses and Ponies received a number of reports claiming that at this year's show a pony used in the rodeo was badly injured. The society's chairman Jenny MacGregor said she was told that the pony had broken its leg and was loaded on to lorry and driven off the showground where the animal was put to sleep.

Mrs MacGregor said: "I was alerted to this incident by several phone calls following the show from concerned members of the public, some of whom have very distressed children in floods of tears who had witnessed the entire incident.

"I was asked by one caller, who described the incident as sickening, what was the society intending to do about it."

Llanthony Show was founded in 1961 and is one of the only shows of its kind that is still completely organised by local volunteers, with no major corporate sponsorship involved.

The show was originally founded following a critical BBC documentary about the Llanthony Valley in 1959 called 'The Dying Valley'. In response to this local people banded together to prove that the Llanthony Valley was anything but dying.

Mrs MacGregor added: "Llanthony Show is a lovely well supported event which has been in existence for 50 years. But we have supposedly moved on in terms of animal welfare and what might have been acceptable when the show was founded five decades ago is certainly not acceptable now in 2011.

"The spectacle of small unhandled ponies being taken of the hill and used in this fashion as entertainment is clearly no longer acceptable.

"As a charity which sees traumatised ponies regrettably on a daily basis due to mishandling in their early days and knowing what it takes, sometimes years, sometimes never to give them trust and confidence in humans we are asking the Llanthony Show to make this the last year that this outdated form of entertainment is used."

The Llanthony Show Committee was due to meet on Tuesday evening for its routine post show review of all aspects of the day and declined to make any comment until after the meeting.